Automated Data Analysis Techniques for a Modern Silicon Debug Environment

With the growing size of modern designs and more strict time-to-market constraints, design errors unavoidably escape pre-silicon verification and reside in silicon prototypes. As a result, silicon debug has become a necessary step in the digital integrated circuit design flow. Although embedded hardware blocks, such as scan chains and trace buffers, provide a means to acquire data of internal signals in real time for debugging, there is a relative shortage in methodologies to efficiently analyze this vast data to identify root-causes. This paper presents an automated software solution that attempts to fill-in the gap.